1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to creating personal autonomous avatars. In particular, the invention relates to a method and an apparatus for creating autonomous personal avatars that are attached to an electronic document.
2. Description of Related Art
Modem electronic documents, even those with hypertext capabilities, are often inferior to face-to-face communications in terms of succinctly conveying information among the author of the document and one or more readers. For example, many pages of detailed information may be required to convey a single idea that in face-to-face scenarios could be conveyed in minutes. This occurs because current electronic documents do not provide the multiple communication channels used by humans, including speech, facial expressions, gestures and speech annotation. Synthetic computer characters, such as two-dimensional animated graphical representations of humans, may be used to help remedy the disparity between the expressiveness of current electronic documents and that of human presenters. Such characters may be used by having the synthetic characters assume the metaphor of human-to-human conversation as a user interface mechanism. Current synthetic character systems fall into two broad categories: “directed characters” and “autonomous agent characters”. Directed characters are those that are under direct and continuous user control. Examples include the various graphical chat-room environments on the Internet and motion picture and television studios specializing in motion-capture generation of cartoon characters. Autonomous agent characters are those that can act and react under their own control. That is, autonomous agent characters are not under direct control of a person. Instead, they are pre-programmed to function as a user interface to a software system.
Current systems using autonomous agent characters include Microsoft Agent (“Introduction to Microsoft Agent,” at http://www.microsoft.com/workshop/prog/agent”). Microsoft Agent provides a very general agent server that allows client programs to launch and control animated characters that can be commanded to execute a named animation sequence, speak a text string, move and resize. JackPresenter (“A Virtual Human Presenter,” Tsuhara Noma and Norman I. Badler, IJCAI, 1997) provides an anthropomorphically-correct, three-dimensional animated human that presents specific material. The PPP Persona Project (“The PPP Persona: a Multipurpose Animated Presentation Agent,” Elizabeth Andre, Jochen Muller and Thomas Rist, Advance Visual Interfaces, ACM Press, 1997) uses a planning system to plan tutorial presentations as specified material given over a target time duration for the presentation. The PPP Persona system simply plans and executes a single presentation and does not support reader annotation of the document.
Another type of synthetic character is the autonomous personal representative. One role that an autonomous personal representative can perform is giving opinions of, or guided tours through, documents. The Active Task Project (“Active Task Through Multimedia Documents,” Polle T. Zellweger, Cambridge University Press, 1988) provides the ability to script presentations of documents or sets of documents but does not use synthetic characters in the interface.